ISC offers commercial 7 x 24 support for Kea, as well as consulting and contract development to assist in implementing Kea, including migration from ISC DHCP.

Kea runs on Linux, BSD, and MacOS, like ISC DHCP. The Kea distribution does not yet include a DHCP client or relay, but because both are standards-based, the ISC DHCP client works fine with the Kea DHCP server. Kea is under active development.

Commercially-licensed hooks

We are building a library of commercially-licensed hooks applications to help support Kea development. These are distributed as source packages, but with an End User License Agreement that prohibits redistribution outside your organization.

Premium Management Features

These are available for separate, one-time purchase from this web site. After you purchase, you may continue using the hook for as long as you like, there is no annual fee. If in the future you require an updated hook library (e.g. because you have updated to a newer version of Kea that requires a newer hook library) simply purchase the new version when you need it.

Our Forensic Logging application works with Kea 1.1 and later versions and creates a separate log that may be useful for meeting law enforcement data retention requirements.

The Flexible Identifier library is supported on Kea 1.2 and later and enables use of almost any available parameter as the identifier for host reservations.

The Host Commands library, supported with Kea 1.2 and later, extends remote management to manage host reservations stored in a back end database.

Subscriber-only Features

In addition to the Forensic Logging (link), Flexible Identifier (link), and Host Commands (link) hooks from the Premium package, Kea support subscribers also receive the following hooks as well. Subscribers will also get any hook library updates that are released while they are active subscribers.

The Subnet Management library, supported with Kea 1.3 and later allows you to add, remove and modify subnets via the API, without resending the entire Kea configuration. This hook library is only available to support subscribers.

The RADIUS Integration library, supported with Kea 1.4 and later, allows Kea to delegate decisions about whether to permit access, and what IP address to assign, to your existing RADIUS server. This hook library, and the associated Host Cache library, is only available to support subscribers.

We liked the fact that ISC Kea is modern software and is designed to be extensible. Kea has hook points where you can add your own logic to parse incoming DHCP packets and modify them as you like right before they leave the server network interface. We leveraged the hooks feature extensively to customize Kea to meet our requirements.

I'm using Kea 1.2 and I didn't have (any) problem provisioning CMs and CPEs on our DOCSIS/HFC networks. I didn't need to disable Client-ID on DHCP Offer packets. ....
Kea docs are well documented...
August 2017 post on Kea-users@lists.isc.org

Weighing your options

Feature

ISC DHCP

Kea Open Source

Kea with Premium Package

Kea with Support

Leases, hosts in local file

√

√

√

√

Leases, hosts in database backend

X

√

√

√

Lease management

Limited

√

√

√

Forensic log

X

X

√

√

Flex-ID (custom client IDs)

X

X

√

√

Host management

X

X

√

√

Subnet, shared network management

X

X

X

√

RADIUS integration

X

X

X

√

LDAP integration

√ (community contribution – unsupported)

X

X

X

Management interfaces

OMAPI (command-line tool using custom syntax)

RESTful/https interface/ JSON commands

RESTful/https interface/ JSON commands(

RESTful/https interface/ JSON commands

Uninterrupted service – online reconfiguration

Limited changes with OMAPI

no restart unless physical interfaces change

no restart unless physical interfaces change(

no restart unless physical interfaces change

Failover

DHCPv4 failover

DHCPv4/v6 high availability mode

DHCPv4/v6 high availability mode

DHCPv4/v6 high availability mode

Professional 7 x 24 support

available

X

X

√

Advice for ISC DHCP Users

You may be wondering whether we recommend you migrate from ISC DHCP to Kea at this time.

Use Kea if:

You need higher performance

You are modernizing your infrastructure

You need to tie your DHCP system to your own provisioning system

You want centralized host reservations

If Kea is missing a minor feature you need

Consider requesting a custom-developed hooks application

Kea hooks can do everything from re-writing options in the packet to triggering external applications